THE HEIRESS
Monday, April 30th, 2012
The Heiress may have reached the ripe old age of sixty-five, but you’d hardly know it from the latest revival of Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s 1947 Broadway hit, adapted from Henry James’ classic novel Washington Square and currently engrossing and delighting audiences in equal measure at the Pasadena Playhouse.
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REBORNING
Sunday, April 29th, 2012
The past continues to haunt the present of the two women whose lives intersect in Zayd Dohrn’s powerful personal drama Reborning, now getting its Southern California Premiere—and only its second production—at Orange County’s illustrious Chance Theater, with Resident Artists Casey Long, Jennifer Ruckman, Karen Webster doing some of their best work ever under Artistic Director Oanh Nguyen’s inspired direction.
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THE GIRL MOST LIKELY TO
Friday, April 27th, 2012
By day, he is a schoolteacher in the Philippines. By night, he becomes the gowned and bejeweled drag entertainer known to all Luzon as Mama Cid.
Across the world, an American high schooler dons girls’ clothes too, but for a very different reason. “This is how I have to be,” he tells his mother. “Otherwise I die.”
Playwright Michael Premsrirat takes these two characters—separated by an ocean and several decades—and ties their stories together quite extraordinarily in The Girl Most Likely To, now getting its World Premiere production under the truly inspired direction of Jon Lawrence Rivera.
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THE PRIDE
Sunday, April 8th, 2012
Playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell puts a personal face on Contemporary Gay History in his provocative, daringly constructed, thought-provoking, occasionally hilarious, and profoundly impactful The Pride, the latest offering by San Diego’s Diversionary Theatre, and one of its very best.
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LAURA
Friday, April 6th, 2012
“Laura is the face in the misty light, footsteps that you hear down the hall, the laugh that floats on a summer night that you can never quite recall…”
Anyone familiar with the mid-20th Century Hit Parade will surely recall the David Raskin/Johnny Mercer song standard “Laura” and its many covers by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, and the majority of film buffs will likely have seen the 1944 Otto Preminger film noir classic of the same name, starring Dana Andrews as a detective investigating the murder of a beautiful, successful ad executive (portrayed in flashbacks by Gene Tierney) and based on a novel by Vera Caspary.
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LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
Monday, April 2nd, 2012
The word dysfunctional may not have been bandied about in the early 1910s when Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night takes place, nor in the early ‘40s when it was completed, nor even in the middle of the Eisenhower ‘50s when it was published posthumously and made its Broadway debut. Still, if anyone understood dysfunctional families, or at least one dysfunctional family in particular, it was O’Neill, as Actors Co-op’s powerful 21st Century revival makes amply clear.
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SIGHT UNSEEN
Friday, March 23rd, 2012
There are times when the order in which a writer sequences the scenes of a play or musical can be as crucial to the work’s impact as the scenes themselves. As in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal or Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, the ordering of scenes in Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen is of prime importance. Cleverly sequenced in a deliberately non-linear fashion, the eight scenes that make up Sight Unseen keep you thinking, keep you guessing, and may even provoke a gasp of surprise or recognition at key moments.
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ANNA CHRISTIE
Monday, March 19th, 2012NOT RECOMMENDED
There are times when a single performance can either salvage a play or sink it. In the case of The Old Globe’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, the latter is unfortunately true.
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